If you’re an ecommerce store owner who’s looking to grow your business, then you’ve probably considered online marketing (OMA) as a potential strategy to help you reach your target audience.
While there are various ways to market your product online, most businesses focus on using digital marketing methods to attract, engage, and convert potential customers into paying customers.
Why Use Digital Marketing To Market Your Ecommerce Website?
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that you can measure the results of your efforts easily. You can track the performance of your campaigns online, including the conversion rate of website visitors into paying customers.
Because digital marketing is so measurable, you can constantly refine your campaign and determine what’s working and what needs to be changed to get more conversions.
If you’re looking to grow your business using ecommerce, then you definitely want to consider using digital marketing to inform your strategy. Let’s examine each stage of the buyer’s journey to determine where you should focus your efforts to grow your business.
The Research Stage
Even before a potential customer lands on your site, you can have them in your digital marketing camp by targeting relevant keywords and creating content that appeals to them.
This is referred to as the research stage of an ecommerce buyer’s journey and it’s an essential stage because it determines what type of content you’ll distribute to them.
You can easily execute this stage in your research, using tools like Google Adwords, Bing Ads, and Facebook advertising.
During this stage, you want to target individuals who are already contemplating a purchase, but aren’t ready to make a decision yet. For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might use the keywords “short-sleeve shirts” and “tank tops” to attract these customers.
The Decide-To-Purchase Stage
Once a person has discovered your product, whether through an organic search, paid search, or a social media post, they are now in your target audience’s awareness stage.
In previous stages, they were searching for information about your product to make a decision. In this stage, they’ve already formed an opinion about your product and are now in the process of making a purchase.
This is the conversion stage. During this stage, you want to focus on getting them to click on a specific call-to-action (CTA) to take them to the next step in the buying process.
The Purchase Stage
Once a person has seen a tempting offer on your website, whether they intended to buy your product or service or not, they’re now in the purchase stage of their journey.
In the previous stage, they may have been turned off by the fear of missing out, so you can imagine how much stronger this stage’s influence will be. You want to focus on getting them to complete their purchase as quickly and easily as possible.
This is the stage where you implement your retargeting strategy. You can target potential customers with ads that appear to be relevant to their previous actions. For example, if someone visits your clothing website and suddenly sees an offer for a hot pink shirt, they may assume that it’s because they were looking for pink shirts and now you’ve reminded them of this – perhaps even at the expense of your competitor’s product.
Post-Purchase Stage
If they decided to purchase your product after all, then congratulations! You’ve been recognized as a legitimate business with staying power. You can use the insights you gained from your customers to grow your business further.
However, this is just the beginning. Now that they’ve committed to buying your product, they’re likely to be in your customer’s mind. To ensure they remember your product, you’ll want to implement a post-purchase strategy. This strategy can be as simple as sending them a follow-up email, but it can also be considerably more involved.
Your post-purchase strategy should consist of actions you’ll take, if repeated again, to promote your product. For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might send them a free hat or a discounton their next purchase. These are just some examples; you’ll want to develop a strategy that’s right for your business.
The goal of your post-purchase strategy is to increase your customers’ engagement with your product. To determine the best course of action for your business, you’ll want to carefully consider your target audience and the product you offer. If you want to learn more, here are a few more tips on getting started with email marketing.